They haven’t seen a thing. No one could have seen less

 All Those Darwinian Doubts

The defense of Darwin’s theory of evolution has now fallen into the hands of biologists who believe in suppressing criticism when possible and ignoring it when not. It is not a strategy calculated in induce confidence in the scientific method. A paper published recently in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington concluded that the events taking place during the Cambrian era could best be understood in terms of an intelligent design—hardly a position unknown in the history of Western science. The paper was, of course, peer-reviewed by three prominent evolutionary biologists. Wise men attend to the publication of every one of the Proceedings’ papers, but in the case of Stephen Meyer’s “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,” the Board of Editors was at once given to understand that they had done a bad thing. Their indecent capitulation followed at once.

Publication of the paper, they confessed, was a mistake. It would never happen again. It had barely happened at all. And peer review?

The hell with it.

“If scientists do not oppose antievolutionism,” Eugenie Scott, the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, remarked, “it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak.” Scott’s understanding of ‘opposition’ had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: “Avoid debates.”

Everyone else had better shut up.

 In this country, at least, no one is ever going to shut up, the more so since the case against Darwin’s theory retains an almost lunatic vitality.

Look—The suggestion that Darwin’s theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences—quantum electrodynamics, say—is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to 13 unyielding decimal places. Darwin’s theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all.

Look—Field studies attempting to measure natural selection inevitably report weak to non-existent selection effects.

Look—Darwin’s theory is open at one end since there is no plausible account for the origins of life.

Look—The astonishing and irreducible complexity of various cellular structures has not yet successfully been described, let alone explained.

Look—A great many species enter the fossil record trailing no obvious ancestors and depart for Valhalla leaving no obvious descendants.

Look—Where attempts to replicate Darwinian evolution on the computer have been successful, they have not used classical Darwinian principles, and where they have used such principles, they have not been successful.

Look—Tens of thousands of fruit flies have come and gone in laboratory experiments, and every last one of them has remained a fruit fly to the end, all efforts to see the miracle of speciation unavailing.

Look—The remarkable similarity in the genome of a great many organisms suggests that there is at bottom only one living system; but how then to account for the astonishing differences between human beings and their near relatives—differences that remain obvious to anyone who has visited a zoo?

But look again—If the differences between organisms are scientifically more interesting than their genomic similarities, of what use is Darwin’s theory since its otherwise mysterious operations take place by genetic variations?

 These are hardly trivial questions. Each suggests a dozen others. These are hardly circumstances that do much to support the view that there are “no valid criticisms of Darwin’s theory,” as so many recent editorials have suggested.

Serious biologists quite understand all this. They rather regard Darwin’s theory as an elderly uncle invited to a family dinner. The old boy has no hair, he has no teeth, he is hard of hearing, and he often drools. Addressing even senior members at the table as Sonny, he is inordinately eager to tell the same story over and over again.

But he’s family. What can you do?

*

The Scientific Embrace of Atheism

At sometime after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first entered space, stories began to circulate that he had been given secret instructions by the Politburo. Have a look around, they told him. Suitably instructed, Gagarin looked around. When he returned without having seen the face of God, satisfaction in high circles was considerable.

The commissars having vacated the scene, it is the scientific community that has acquired their authority. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Weinberg, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, and most recently the mathematician John Paulos, have had a look around: They haven’t seen a thing. No one could have seen less.

It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein—were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

The distinguished physicist Steven Weinberg has acknowledged that this is what the great scientists believed: But we know better, he has insisted, because we know more.

This prompts the obvious question: Just what have scientists learned that might persuade the rest of us that they know better? It is not, presumably, the chemistry of boron salts that has done the heavy lifting.

There is quantum cosmology, I suppose, a discipline in which the mysteries of quantum mechanics are devoted to the question of how the universe arose or whether it arose at all. This is the subject made popular in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It is an undertaking radi ant in its incoherence. Given the account of creation offered in Genesis and the account offered in A Brief History of Time, I know of no sane man who would hesitate between the two.

And there is Darwin’s theory of evolution. It has been Darwin, Richard Dawkins remarked, that has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

A much better case might be made in the other direction. It is atheism that makes it possible for a man to be an intellectually fulfilled Darwinist. In the documentary Expelled, one of those curious exercises in which some scientists, at least, say what they really think, Ben Stein interviews a number of Darwinian biologists eager to evade the evidence whenever possible or to ignore it when not. Rich in self-satisfaction, Dawkins appears at the film’s end.

How did life on earth arise?

The question, Dawkins acknowledges, is very difficult.

Perhaps the seeds of life were sent here from outer space?

It could well be.

Or by a vastly superior intelligence?

Well, yes.

Questions and their answers follow one another, but in the end Stein says nothing. There is no absurdity Dawkins is not prepared to embrace so long as he can avoid a transcendental inference.

Beyond quantum cosmology and Darwinian biology—the halt and the lame—there is the solemn metaphysical aura of science itself. It is precisely the aura to which so many scientists reverently appeal. The philosopher John Searle has seen the aura. The “universe,” he has written, “consists of matter, and systems defined by causal relations.”

Does it indeed? If so, then God must be nothing more than another material object, a class that includes stars, starlets and solitons. If not, what reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?

We have no reason whatsoever. If neither the sciences nor its aura have demonstrated any conclusion of interest about the existence of God, why then is atheism valued among scientists?

 It takes no very refined analytic effort to determine why Soviet Commissars should have regarded themselves as atheists. They were unwilling to countenance a power higher than their own. Who knows what mischief Soviet citizens might have conceived had they imagined that the Politburo was not, after all, infallible?

By the same token, it requires no very great analytic effort to understand why the scientific community should find atheism so attractive a doctrine. At a time when otherwise sober individuals are inclined to believe that too much of science is too much like a racket, it is only sensible for scientists to suggest aggressively that no power exceeds their own.

The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays

David Berlinski

Darwin and the mathematicians

  EVOLUTION NEWS: IN THE PAST, YOU’VE REMARKED ABOUT MATHEMATICIANS and their opinions of Darwin’s theory of evolution. They were skeptical, you said; very skeptical. John von Neumann was an example. How do you know that about him and about other mathematicians?

David Berlinski (DB): How do I know? Here’s how: I have been close to a number of mathematicians, and friends with others: Daniel Gallin (who died before he could begin his career), M. P. Schützenberger (my great friend), René Thom (a friend as well), Gian-Carlo Rota (another friend), Lipman Bers (who taught me complex analysis and with whom I briefly shared a hospital room, he leaving as I was coming), Paul Halmos (a colleague in California), and Irving Segal (a friend by correspondence, embattled and distraught). Some of these men I admired very much, and all of them I liked.

I had many other friends in the international mathematical community. We exchanged views; I got around.

Among the mathematicians that I knew from very roughly 1970 to 1995, the general attitude toward Darwin’s theory was one of skepticism. These days, I do not get around all that much, and whatever the mathematician’s pulse, I do not have my finger on it. But the reactions of which I speak were hardly surprising. Until recently, mathematicians have been skeptical of any discipline beyond mathematics, and I say until recently because attitudes as well as times have changed.

In talking of the mathematician’s skepticism, I mentioned von Neumann because his name was widely known. I might have mentioned Gian-Carlo Rota. He despised the enveloping air of worship associated with Darwin; he thought biology primitive and dishonest.

How do I know this? I know it because we were close friends, and because he said so. He said so to me.

Gian-Carlo had, in fact, read closely one of my unpublished papers on Darwinian evolution. Written in late 1970, during my stay at IIASA (the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), my essay later made its way into Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck, stripped by then of almost all of its technical details.

A few mathematicians at IIASA had already read what I had written; they had, after all, encouraged me to write it. When we met later in the year, Gian-Carlo offered me his delighted agreement, which he extended in the spirit of it’s about time; he urged me to keep at it; he considered publishing my essay in his journal; but after some back and forth between us, he decided that it would be best were I never to publish another word on the subject.

Gian-Carlo was a man of very refined political sensibilities.

It is a mistake to read back into the recent past the political and emotional structure of discussions now current.

Reading things backwards is vulgar as intellectual history and false to the facts—vulgar because it assigns an aspect of permanence to our own obsessions; and false because it distorts the play of forces playing just a few decades ago.

In the first part of the twentieth century, Darwin v. Dissent had not yet acquired its riveting incarnation as a melodrama of intolerance. No heresy, no heretics is a useful proverb, and using, say, 1950 as a reference point, there were no heretics among the mathematicians because there was yet no heresy. Darwin’s theory was not then considered totemic; and his touch was not widely understood to cure erysipelas. Darwin v. Dissent is of our time and place.

Now von Neumann turned from pure mathematics in the 1940s and the early 1950s. Like so many other mathematicians and physicists, he regarded the theory of evolution as a placeholder, the full and so the real theory waiting somewhere in the wings of time.

When Erwin Schrödinger published What is Life? in 1944, he electrified the mathematicians and the physicists; and he influenced profoundly biologists such as Francis Crick, the latter a form of Rural Electrification, I suppose. Schrödinger’s impact is easy to understand: he gave biologists a set of ideas that they had been unable to give themselves.

“How can the events in space and time,” Schrödinger asked, “which take place within the spatial boundary of living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?”

These words were written in 1944.

“The preliminary answer which this little book will endeavor to expound,” Schrödinger went on to say, “… can be summarized as follows: the obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for such events is no reason at all for doubting that they can be accounted for by those scientists.”

I have placed in italics words that establish Schrödinger’s attitude. I do not know which word to stress more: the obviousness of an inability, or the inability of an obviousness.

So I have stressed them together. They reflect the attitude of mathematicians and physicists toward biology during the 1940s, 1950s, and at least a part of the 1960s.

Having asked for a clue, Schrödinger found one on his own. He predicted the existence of a code script, one governing heredity. Just eight years later, Watson and Crick published the first of their two great papers on the structure of DNA.

Everyone took notice, the biologists because Schrödinger had been prophetic, and the mathematicians and physicists because Schrödinger had been one of their own.

These remarks belong to the considerable category of things that must be kept in mind.

So keep them in mind.

What was it that comprised von Neumann’s skepticism about evolution?

It was an attitude in three aspects. Von Neumann, in the first place, saw what mathematicians had seen since Darwin first published his theory. The theory required life to clamber over some very sobering improbabilities; indeed, it seemed to require miracles. Other mathematicians were making the same point. “The formation within geological time of a human body,” Kurt Gödel remarked in conversation with Hao Wang, “by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its components.”

Note the word geological. Gödel, like everyone else, quite understood that Darwin’s theory played out over long stretches of time. He might even have grasped the concept of natural selection, commonly said to be too difficult for all but a handful of initiates. He was skeptical nonetheless. It was precisely to do battle against this kind of skepticism that Richard Dawkins wrote TheBlind Watchmaker. His proximate target may have been the physicist Fred Hoyle, but his general target was a whole climate of opinion current among mathematicians and physicists.

Von Neumann, in the second place, thought Darwin’s theory inadequate. He thought the theory inadequate because the theory did not yet exist. This is as inadequate as it gets. What did exist lacked the fundamentals. It answered no questions. It had no depth. And it was largely anecdotal. This sense of anecdotal has nothing to do with the idea of just-so stories made popular by Lewontin and Gould. Darwin’s theory was anecdotal, von Neumann suggested, because it lacked the rich and productive concepts that only mathematicians could provide the sciences.

Writing in the 1967 Wistar Symposium, Murray Eden offered a fine sense of the way in which mathematicians and physicists thought Darwin’s theory inadequate. “The continuity of evolution does not demonstrate that natural laws are operative, for the laws are not known.”

Murray then added a most useful analogy. “It is,” he wrote referring to Darwin’s theory, “as if some pre-Newtonian cosmologist had proposed a theory of planetary motion which supposed that natural force of unknown origin held the planets to their courses.”

Just so. This is what Darwin’s theory is like; and it was how it appeared to a great many mathematicians and physicists.

And then Murray added a demurral. “The supposition is right enough and the idea of a force between two celestial bodies is a very useful one, but it is hardly a theory.”

Far from being controversial among mathematicians in the 1940s and 1950s, a sense of the inadequacy of Darwin’s theory was widespread.

And there is a third and final component to von Neumann’s skepticism, this one no more than a hint. To say that von Neumann was skeptical of Darwin’s theory is not to say that he was a supporter of intelligent design. Yet there is a curious remark he made to Stan Ulam. I suspect that he made the remark at the end of his life. Von Neumann pointed to a house in the distance and remarked to Ulam how absurd it would be to think that the house just assembled itself. The men were discussing Darwin’s theory. It was not simply a doubt about improbability to which von Neumann gave voice: it was a more general susurrus of discontent. The remark suggests that just possibly von Neumann’s sensibility had undergone a change. Ulam never said anything more to Marco Schützenberger and Marco never said anything more to me.

There remains nonetheless that air of intellectual poignancy. Perhaps von Neumann was aware of his impending death.

So much for what mathematicians thought and think; so much for what von Neumann thought and thank.

I now pass to the point of this exercise. Where did I get my information? Let me tell you. I got my information about von Neumann from the horse’s mouth, the horse one step removed from the horse himself.

Quite obviously I did not know von Neumann personally. He was too old and I too young ever to have met. So what I know of views I know at second hand. I know it from my friends.

Stanislaw Ulam was close to von Neumann—very close; and Ulam was also close to Marco and Gian-Carlo Rota—very close again. They were close enough to share their views. I knew Marco and Gian-Co very well; and they were close friends of mine.

Since Marco and I were writing a book together about evolution, our interest in von Neumann’s views was natural. Natural, but not consuming. It was a part of the chatter, and it would be wrong to suppose that our curiosity was anything more than curiosity. The subject came up. What had von Neumann thought? We discussed it. Von Neumann stories were told, as they always were.

Let me fix the time and place:

The winter of 1979–1980.

Paris.

And again a year later in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, where I gave a lecture and Gian-Carlo acted as my host and the source for further stories.

When this issue first emerged, I was asked for references. I am not a von Neumann scholar, and I have not consulted any of the sources. What I know of von Neumann’s views, I know from his friends. But what I know is entirely consistent with the development of his own ideas. Von Neumann’s work on self-reproducing automata is an interesting attempt to make good the deficiencies of a theory that he understood had deficiencies and needed remedying, a demonstration of the thesis, left unremarked, unanalyzed, and unstated in Darwin’s theory, that a self-reproducing automaton is logically possible. It fills one hole.

Ulam’s paper “On Some Mathematical Problems Suggested by Problems in Biology” fills another hole. In it he introduced what he called a “biological metric space” into theoretical biology. The date is 1970. The place is the Rockefeller Institute. And the idea, by the way, is pure Marco. Ulam’s paper marks his indifference to the dominant paradigm of Sewell Wright’s population genetics. Gone are both Euclidean metrics and Wright’s very elaborate apparatus of differential equations.

Whether a theory with quite so many holes in its plush is worth mending is another question entirely.

When the issue of von Neumann’s views appeared in the blogosphere, Douglas Theobald, a contributor to Panda’s Thumb, much occupied in discharging his indignation, wrote a little post. Von Neumann had apparently said something: “I still somewhat shudder,” von Neumann wrote in a letter to George Gamow, “at the thought that highly efficient, purposive organizational elements, like the proteins, should originate in a random process.”1

Having shuddered, von Neumann apparently got hold of himself. “Yet many efficient (?) and purposive (??) media, e.g., language or the national economy, also look statistically controlled, when viewed from a suitably limited aspect. On balance, I would therefore say that your argument is quite strong.”2

Theobald suggests that Von Neumann’s shuddering remark, taken out of context, “may be the ultimate source of many of the claims that von Neumann was anti-evo.”3It may well be, but it is not my source, as I have explained in detail.

Still, what lends to this exchange its lurid aspect is that having shuddered, von Neumann might have kept right on shuddering, for if von Neumann was criticizing Gamow’s theories about protein formation, he was right to do so because Gamow’s theories were wrong.

And there is the final, the inimitable, touch. I have never claimed that von Neumann was “anti-evo.”

What an idea. No one is. What I did claim is that like so many others, von Neumann was profoundly skeptical about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

And I have just said why.

Science After Babel

David Berlinski

Sonja Kovalevsky

  SOFYA VASILEVNA KOVALEVSKAYA (SONJA KOVALEVSKY) WAS BORN in Moscow in 1850 and died in Stockholm in 1891. The city is mathematically unlucky, René Descartes having died there in 1650 of some dreadful bronchial infection. A woman of very considerable talents, both as a mathematician and as a writer, Sonja Kovalevsky lived within the confines of an impudent Russian melodrama, simultaneously its heroine and its victim.

Within that melodrama, there was wealth, privilege, and a luxurious estate; there was an overbearing father, a man whose moods could ruin the household’s peace; there was a most musical Mama, the daughter of a famous Russian astronomer; there was an older sister, Anya, first-born and so best-loved, and a younger brother, Feyda, the household Prince and heir, Big Anya and Little Feyda attracting dangerously unstable elective affinities from their parents; there was a strict, prim, and humorless governess, mad for decorum and discipline (of course there was); and there was that staple of every Russian melodrama, an eccentric but fun-loving uncle, who, as she relates in her memoir,  A Russian Childhood, told an eager unloved child fairy tales, arranged a chessboard to suit her pudgy fingers, and talked with great dreaminess about “squaring the circle, asymptotes, and other things that were unintelligible to me and yet seemed mysterious and at the same time deeply attractive.”

As a child, Sonja Kovalevsky acquired the rudiments of nineteenth-century mathematics by studying a textbook written by yet another Russian figure scuttling in from the theater wings of time, a Professor Tyrtov, who just happened to be a landowner, a man of means, and a neighbor, his conviction that women were incapable of mastering mathematics dissolving in helpless admiration as the shy but determined Sonja Kovalevsky deftly sorted through the complicated formulae of his textbook and solved the problems that it presented. Having discovered her talent, Tyrtov persuaded her father that she must be allowed to continue her education, Sonja Kovalevsky becoming their communal ward, a little innocent being transferred from the care of one well-meaning wise guardian to another.

 For all that, her father’s assent required four years before it was fully forthcoming, but in the end, and with the sense that he had done a manful but difficult thing, he allowed Sonja Kovalevsky to study analytic geometry and the calculus in Saint Petersburg. She was tutored, of course, and chaperoned, and kept cozy, comfortable, and captive, the distance in her life from the ordinary world, in which men freely took up their studies in large, noisy, boisterous groups, serving only to inflame the intensity of her desires, her pitiful pained ardor.

No one doubted that Sonja Kovalevsky was remarkable—not her Russian tutors, at any rate. And no one doubted that she deserved a university education. But Russian universities were closed to women. If Sonja Kovalevsky could not study at home, she would have to study abroad. In nineteenth-century Russia, as in contemporary Islam, an unmarried woman’s freedom to travel was almost as difficult to obtain as her freedom to study, if only because her latent erotic power was considered so dangerously unstable a force that any father would be made uneasy by the thought of his darling daughter reclining with easy indolence against the cushions of the international sleeper departing Saint Petersburg every evening, her decorously shielded limbs a provocation to plump Russian businessmen, military officers, card sharks, land-owners, bureaucrats, Swiss officials, and even the ministers of various tea and pastry wagons.

A woman sitting alone and—of all things!—reading a treatise on mathematics was widely regarded among even educated men as an invitation to debauchery. Anna Karenina had spent a good deal of time traveling alone on the night-sleeper from Saint Petersburg to Moscow, after all, and even though she was a married woman, no one could miss the associative clack of trains, travel, and treachery.

What Sonja Kovalevsky might have done abroad while living alone and doing as she pleased was an exercise in her family’s already agitated erotic imagination. The solution was a masterpiece of contrivance: an arranged marriage to one  Vladimir Kovalesky, a biologist by training, a paleontologist in prospect, and an ardent admirer of Charles Darwin. By surrendering her liberty, Sonja Kovalevsky gained her freedom. She decamped for Heidelberg, a beautiful university town in the nineteenth century, and today still lovely, graceful and gabled.

Her professors’ glowing testimonials enabled her to meet  Karl Weierstrass, one of the eminences of the German mathematical academy. Kindly, rumpled, and disheveled, Weierstrass challenged Sonja Kovalevsky with a set of problems he had prepared for his advanced students, and when she had solved them with a positively alarming degree of ease, determined generously that her “personality was [strong enough] to offer the necessary guarantees” for advanced training. To the uncles she had already acquired, Sonja Kovalevsky added a powerful new uncle, so that she appeared in European mathematical circles as the glowing star at the center of an avuncular galaxy.

Thereafter, her short life was consumed by her ardent nature. The contrived and pathetic marriage into which she had entered as a matter of convenience made demands of its own, and both she and Vladimir Kovalesky discovered to their surprise that an arrangement to which neither was committed became one in which both were consumed.

After four years in Heidelberg, the couple returned to Saint Petersburg, where Sonja Kovalevsky discovered almost at once that a society unwilling to allow her an education was equally unwilling to afford her a position. She gave birth to a daughter, whom she seemed equally to have adored and to have neglected. She wrote for various theatrical and literary publications; she started a novel. Persuaded like so many other talented women that her gifts were fungible, she and her husband embarked on a number of business schemes, each one a notable, even a spectacular, failure, disasters accumulating until their marriage dissolved under the strain.

 Vladimir Kovalesky took his own life in 1883.

It can hardly be said that Sonja Kovalesky lived a life without honors—only that she lived it without luck. Decamping from Saint Petersburg for Paris, where her sister was already making the acquaintance of various revolutionary bohemians, men whose commitment to violence was offset by their indifference to work, she reentered the mathematical scene, and with that special gift she had for attracting uncles, caught the eye of  Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a student of the great Weierstrass, and a powerful and determined mathematician in his own right. Mittag-Leffler became her last champion, in the end persuading the University of Stockholm to award her a probationary position, one of those awkward arrangements so familiar in academic life in which every requirement except decency is satisfied.

She continued to work; she achieved many notable results in the theory of ordinary and partial differential equations, and in 1888, she received the Prix Bordin from the French Academy of Science. Like the Russians, the French were prepared to honor achievement without ever making it possible. Her position in Stockholm was made permanent; and she was elected to the Russian Academy of Science. Her hope that as a member of the Academy she might be rewarded by an academic position was not fulfilled, circumstances that she met with a characteristic mixture of contempt and resignation. In 1891, she died quite suddenly after suffering from pneumonia, and now survives as a face engraved on a Russian postage stamp, and a name attached to a crater on the far side of the moon.

All this belongs, I suppose, to the universal history of sadness; but in her autobiography, A Russian Childhood, Sonja Kovalevsky recalls with some sense of wonder an early memory.

 She was eleven. Her bedroom required wallpaper, and for reasons that even Sonja Kovalevsky cannot explain, the walls were covered with notes and scribbles from a calculus text owned by her military-minded father. Her uncle had already introduced her to mathematics, but not to higher mathematics or the formulas of the calculus.

“I noticed certain things,” she wrote, “that I had already heard mentioned by uncle. It amused me to examine these sheets of hieroglyphics whose meaning escaped me completely but which, I felt, must signify something very wise and interesting.”

But, really, isn’t this is how we all are, much impressed by things we do not understand and hoping that they represent something very wise and interesting?

HUMAN NATURE

David Berlinski